Care Noir: Before and After COVID-19

Abstract

This chapter delineates a form of literary imaginary, broadly analogous to ‘film noir,’ focused on late-life institutional care. Tracing the literary origins of ‘care noir,’ the chapter identifies a key consolidation of its remit in British experimental fiction of the 1950s to 1970s, as writers responded to new welfare-state provisions for older people in receipt of medical and social support. Three texts are seen as having developed care noir’s blend of malignity and black comedy with exceptional technical inventiveness and psychological insight: Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959), Paul Bailey’s At the Jerusalem (1967), and B. S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal (1971). The chapter places their refinement of care-noir conventions in a larger critical context whereby paranoid modern fictions of abuse can be seen as consciously exaggerating concerns rooted in real-life observations of what extreme frailty and dementia may do to erode personal agency while also, potentially, intensifying verbal self-expression. The chapter is framed by attention to very recent works of fiction in which the high number of ‘excess’ care-home deaths attributed to COVID-19 has put pressure on ‘care noir,’ paving the way for renewed literary-political attention to institutional geriatric care.